An Investigation of the Performance of Local Contractors in Kenya

Abstract

The performance of contractors is a great determinant of their success or failure. Poor performance is linked to failure whereas good performance is linked to success. Despite of this, contractors in most industries of the world, and most especially the developing countries, have been accused of poor performance. In Kenya, the situation is not different as the performance of the contractors has been termed as poor as far as time, cost and quality is concerned. This study therefore sought to validate this accusation by finding out the level of the performance of contractors in Kenya. Thirteen performance measures as identified in the literature review were used as the scale of measure. These were: time, cost, quality, client satisfaction, health and safety, environment protection, participants' satisfaction, community satisfaction, sustainability of the development, functionality of the development, communication, profitability and productivity. The study employed the quantitative strategy as well as the cross-sectional research design. Quantitative data was collected through the use of structured questionnaires which were administered to local contractors of category NCA 1, 2 and 3. The contractors were sampled using the stratified random sampling and the systematic random sampling techniques. The data was analyzed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS for windows version 20). The method used for data analysis was descriptive statistics. The analysis revealed that the local contractors are average performers when all the performance measures are used to gauge their performance. But when these performance measures are considered separately, they performed poorly on time, cost, profitability, productivity and client satisfaction. They have an average performance on health and safety, participants' satisfaction, community satisfaction, environmental protection, sustainability, communication, quality and functionality. This study therefore concludes that local contractors in Kenya of category NCA 1, 2 and 3 can be termed as average performers rather than poor performers.